A lighting enabled system and methods for building evacuation planning

Abstract

Disclosed are a system and method for developing computational models of the behavior of a building's occupants using data acquired from sensor-equipped connected luminaires. The models are then used to develop an optimized evacuation plan for safe and timely egress of the occupants without requiring mock evaluation drills.

Description

FIELD OF THE INVENTION[0001]The present invention is directed to a system and method for developing computational models of the behavior of a building's occupants using data acquired from sensor-equipped connected luminaires. The models are then used to plan and design evacuation plans for safe and timely egress of the occupants.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]Large buildings, such as office spaces and residential high rises, in cities periodically undergo mock evacuations to inspect the validity of an evacuation plan and the readiness of the occupants to execute the plan. These mock drills are expensive in terms of the total man-hours lost in the drills, as well as inconvenient to the occupants of the buildings. Moreover, the evacuation plans are typically designed before the occupants move into the building, and are therefore agnostic of actual occupant dynamics. Flexible office spaces, which dynamically manage the workspaces based on demand, and events in the buildings like conf...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0006]In the present invention the lighting system is used to collect fine-grained data about mobility of people. This data is then used to learn models of occupancy and motion among different rooms. System identification is used to learn these models. The models are then transformed to computational models that are amenable to formal verification-based analytics. Formal verification is the process of exhaustively and automatically analyzing the trajectories of a model of the underlying system. In safety-critical applications, such as defense and aerospace, and mission-critical applications, such as chip manufacturing, formal verification has successfully been used to guarantee the safety of large complex systems. The exhaustive nature of analysis ensures that guarantees can be given on the safety and timeliness of the evacuation plan.

Problems solved by technology

Reduces any dependency on expensive and time-consuming mock drills, which can cause inconvenience to the building occupants,

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